Dell AppAssure™ Gives Ubicom an Easy Route to Disaster Recovery

Background

Ubicom develops multithreaded 32-bit microprocessors for use in the embedded consumer and small/home office networking markets. Ubicom’s IP processor families provide superior processing performance and efficiency. Its flexible technology is considered best-in-class. While Ubicom employees have access to a wide variety of communication tools – phones, BlackBerry devices and pagers; e-mail remains the main path between them and their customers, partners and suppliers. “E-mail is our backbone,” says Jim Poehlman, Ubicom’s Director of IT. “Losing e-mail is what I’m most fearful of.” The need to secure Ubicom’s Microsoft Exchange environment without increasing management overhead led Poehlman to deploy the Dell AppAssure software platform.

Concerned about Disaster Recovery (DR)

One Exchange server and 200 mailboxes comprise the “backbone” of Ubicom’s communications environment. A BlackBerry server and five general Windows Servers add communications and productivity capabilities on which all Ubicom employees are dependent. Protecting these mission-critical servers falls to Jim Poehlman, Director of IT at Ubicom.

“Anyone who has ever administered Microsoft Exchange has experienced an outage,” says Poehlman. “I certainly have, and I don’t ever want to go through the problems presented by an outage again. I also needed the ability to protect every part of our environment and bring it back up quickly. I was really concerned about disaster recovery.”

Search for a Solution: The Third Time’s the Charm

Poehlman began to evaluate Exchange backup and recovery solutions in hopes of finding one that would fully protect his Exchange, BlackBerry, and other Microsoft servers without requiring additional management. The first contender was expensive, took a long time to install, required a lot of babysitting, and, Poehlman remembers, “when it broke it was horrific. It had to be completely reinstalled.” The second solution had no central console; each server had to be managed separately, and the solution used a lot of resources. “Utilization went way up when we took snapshots. It was a problem for end-users.”

Poehlman tried Dell AppAssure after receiving an e-mail bulletin about the software. “The web demo gave an exact view of the product,” says Poehlman. “Most companies make product installation and use look easier than they actually are, but with Dell AppAssure, I got exactly what I expected. It was the easiest backup and disaster recovery solution I’ve ever deployed.”

Deploying Dell AppAssure into Production

Dell AppAssure immediately began helping Poehlman during the installation process. “I couldn’t install the Dell AppAssure agent, indicating that there was a problem with the server’s VSS (volume shadow service) architecture,” he says. “It turns out, I had an old application that had to be removed. Without doing that I wouldn’t have been able to take a snapshot from a remote machine using any solution.”

After fixing that problem, Poehlman quickly completed the installation and completed his first Exchange server snapshot. Dell AppAssure continued to take snapshots every 15 minutes for the next two days of the entire server. “Every time I checked Dell AppAssure, it was working perfectly,” says Poehlman. He began to explore Dell AppAssure’s VM (virtual machine) capabilities and discovered that he could very easily bring up a virtual machine as a hot standby if his Exchange server ever went down.

Poehlman completed his roll-out by pointing his single Dell AppAssure server at a BlackBerry server and five other Windows application servers, in addition to his Microsoft Exchange server. “Dell AppAssure can back up and protect all of these servers which reduces the number of back up licenses I have to purchase. Instead of purchasing and deploying licenses and software on each server, I buy one license for my Dell AppAssure server and the simple agents communicate between the Dell AppAssure server and the protected systems.”

Being a technical person that works in a technical company, Poehlman is constantly getting Dell AppAssure to do more. “I really like to dig in to a solution and figure things out,” he admits. And he’s found compatriots at Dell AppAssure. “The support team is great. They really know the technology. And even though they’re on the East Coast and I’m in California, they get in touch with me after their work day has ended. They’re right on it.”

Poehlman’s bottom line: Dell AppAssure works as advertised – with no complaint or problem.

About Ubicom

Founded in 2000, Ubicom is a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in San Jose, CA, that develops processor and software solutions to optimize data flow when Media Meets Networking. Ubicom has shipped over 13 million units as of June 2009 to OEMs and ODMs around the world for a wide range of products including streaming media devices, home media distribution products, and wireless routers. Ubicom’s fourth generation IP7K processor family is the latest in their line of 32-bit processors for high performance embedded applications.